Rotations is the first Golden Retriever album to split configuration from methodology. Until now the duo’s music has been all about what Matt Carlson (synthesizer, piano) and Jonathan Sielaff (bass clarinet, effects) could do together, first by improvising in real time and more recently in the recording studio. But the genesis of this project lies in a grant provided by Portland, Oregon’s Regional Arts & Culture Council, which gave them the resources to stage some concerts in the fall of 2015 of new music that added pipe organ, woodwinds, brass, percussion and the Mousai Remix String Quartet to their core instrumentation.
The concerts took place at a non-profit venue called The Old Church, but music was all recorded at Golden Retriever’s studio except for the pipe organ; there’s no moving one of those things. Rather like the music on label-mate Tortoise’s last album The Catastrophist, the commissioned music was just a first step in an extended process of writing, transcription, rewriting, recording and overdubbing. The resulting six pieces place moments that recall the linear and contrapuntal dimensions of Golden Retriever’s earlier music within a more spacious and eventful sound field. “Pelagic Tremors” opens the record with a suitably oceanic rumble of piano and percussion that sets the stage for waves of synthesized melody that surge and recede in near-tidal fashion. “A Kind Of Leaving” is likewise patient, advancing a pensive piano melody for the better part of a minute before the bass clarinet comes in. Sielaff eschews the processing that has often made his horn sound more like an electric guitar, and you might think you’re hearing an acoustic recording until you notice the electronic activity that plays like sparks of St. Elmo’s Fire around the music’s periphery.
The patient deployment of new resources is one of Rotations’ greatest strengths. The strings barely register until near the end of side one, where they mix with the synthesizers like the streams of migrating fish that can turn certain Oregon streams into sources for an instant meal in at certain times of year. Another is the way Carlson and Sielaff have used the additional sonic elements to make music that they never could have made before, but still retains their original character at its core. “Thirty-Six Stratagems” proceeds from shimmering percussion that brings to mind Tatsuya Nakatani’s gong music into a paroxysm of arrhythmic percussion and bursting synthesizer tones; it’s as though Golden Retriever dropped into an orchestra in the midst of a palette-cleansing outbreak of improvisation. Freed from limits but still in touch with their essence, Sielaff and Carlson have done a fine job of changing their game.
